November 22, 2001

Everybody Knows Your Name
   by mousel <amousel@hotmail.com>

Now, listen to what I have to say about this topic and tell me if you can relate. I am a 21 year-old college student and I graduated from a small high school in West-Central Wisconsin. How many of you have come from a town with no grocery store, unless you count the gas station, which I suppose to some would count as a grocery store, but anyway. My graduating class had about 75 students.(Setting the record for the high school, oh my god, better start expanding!) How many of you relate to that???

Now granted I do have a lot of close friends and family there, but it was sometimes a horrible place to live. I've always been an outspoken person, and a guy that loved to run around and do my thing. I was known as controversial in that school, and "known as" is the key word there. I'm telling you, if you were to accidentally have a booger fly out of your nose during class (for god knows why), I'm sure the clerk that worked down at the gas station would ask you about it. Swear to god. It seemed like every time I turned around there was some sort of rumor going around about me or one of my friends. People always exaggerated everything too. If I were to be drinking a bottle of pop, most likely it would somehow get around that I was really drinking a beer. That's another thing, if you were to go out on a Friday night and have a beer, you were bad. Then you would hear kids' parents saying, "hunny don't hang out with him, he's a terrible person."

Now don't get me wrong, I was a pretty popular guy so I heard a lot of things too and probably spread a few rumors, but come on, that was just ridiculous. I just feel bad for the kids that were complete nerds. I mean damn, the nerdiest kids in the school even got ripped apart by the faculty. I joined in on that and that is something I'm not real proud of now, considering half those kids were actually cool people. I don't make my way around town much anymore, but my name still does. It's crazy the things that people know (or think they know) around there. I'm sure once this article gets posted the whole school will look at it tomorrow, even the younger kids that don't know me. So I just want to say hello to all of you students at Elk Mound High School and PFFT, don't tell everybody you saw this article!

Published: November 23, 2001
Editor: stacy